A Hoot of a Ceremony

Author Melissa Hart and husband Jonathan release a red-tailed hawk at their nuptials.

“Jonathan? Melissa? Meet us on the lawn and close your eyes.”

Grinning staff members at the Cascades Raptor Center led us past our lopsided wedding cake to the grass outside the visitors’ center. “We have a gift for you … don’t peek.”

For years, we’d volunteered to clean mews, feed orphaned owls and medicate injured hawks at the nature center and wildlife hospital in Eugene. After Jonathan proposed, we asked to marry at the center.

My mother wrote for a glossy wedding magazine. Reading her articles, I absorbed an abundance of white tulle, three-tiered cakes, snowy linen tablecloths. We rejected these niceties in favor of shivering in the cold of a March afternoon with Lorax, the great-horned owl, as our ring-bearer and volunteers with other resident birds on their gloves.

Our ceremony lasted five minutes, conducted by a purple-haired minister. At one point, Lorax ripped our rings from the ribbon around her foot and hurled them into the mud. During our first kiss as a married couple, the resident raven called out, “What’cha doing?”

He stood with a hooded red-tailed hawk in his arms — a bird we’d helped to feed and medicate during its recovery from injury. “It’s healed now,” staff said, “ready to release into the wild.”

Jonathan, ever generous, handed me the hawk and loosened its tiny leather hood. I clasped its strong legs in my hands, held it against my chest. “Just toss it into the air,” my new husband coached. “One, two, three!”